What Is Phonological/Phoneme Awareness?

Stanovich (1993-94) defines "phonological awareness" as the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable. He also notes that researchers "argue intensely" about the meaning of the term and about the nature of the tasks used to measure it. Harris and Hodges (1995) present a brief essay on phonemic awareness. Another oft-cited source (Adams, 1990) uses "phonemic awareness" almost exclusively. Phonological awareness sometimes refers to an awareness that words consist of syllables, "onsets and rimes," and phonemes, and so can be considered as a broader notion than phonemic awareness. Each term is widely used and perhaps (if incorrectly) used interchangeably. In preparing this Digest, both terms were used to search the ERIC database. For the purposes of this Digest, each author's use will be followed.

Adams (1990) describes 5 levels of phonemic awareness in terms of abilities:

• to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes
• to do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration)
• to blend and split syllables
• to perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of phonemes in a word) to perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder).

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the knowledge that words are made up of individual sounds. Phonological awareness is the precursor to phonics which is frequently the method used to teach children to read. If a child can not “sound out a word” or does not have good “word attack skills”, it is possible that he may not have the underlying phonological awareness skills necessary to understand and use phonics skills.



The development of phonological awareness begins during the preschool years. It is not unusual for a child of 4 years to be able to tell a syllable of a word when ask to “tell me a little bit of telephone.” Even though she does not know the word syllable, she will say “tel” or “a” or “phone” in response to this request. By 5 years it is not unusual for a child who has been exposed to rhyme to detect a rhyme, that is she will fill in the missing rhyming word in a familiar rhyme. Also by 5 years, most children have memorized poems or finger plays which is also a part of phonological awareness development.